Machiavelli and the Play-Element in Political Life

• Author: Robyn Marasco
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211046573
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211046573

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(4) 575 –595

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917211046573

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Article

Machiavelli and the

Play-Element in Political

Life

Robyn Marasco1

Abstract

This essay interprets Machiavelli’s famous letter to Francesco Vettori in

terms of a play-element that runs across his works. The letter to Vettori

is a masterpiece of epistolary form, but beyond its most memorable

passage, where Machiavelli recounts his evening in study, it has not received

much scholarly attention. Reading the letter in its entirety is to discover

Machiavelli’s account of an eclectic political education and the pleasures of

playing with others. Machiavelli’s letter speaks to a basic ludicity in his political

thinking, in which play is not opposed to the serious, and diverse play forms

can be thought together. Hans-George Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Johan

Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, and Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games provide

resources for reconstructing this play-element in Machiavelli’s thought.

Keywords

Machiavelli, play, epistolary, homo ludens, Gadamer, Huizinga, Caillois

The Letter to Vettori, 10 December 1513

In his celebrated letter to Francesco Vettori, dated December 10th of 1513,

Machiavelli details his daily life on his farm and the conditions under which

1Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Robyn Marasco, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, 695 Park Ave, New York,

NY 10065, USA.

Email: rmarasco@hunter.cuny.edu

1046573PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211046573Political TheoryMarasco

research-article2021

576 Political Theory 50(4)

1. William J. Connell has provided the undisputed historical account of the terms of

Machiavelli’s relegatio, which prohibited travel beyond the Florentine state (to

Rome, for example) but still permitted him easy access to Florence.

2. I rely here on Connell’s assessment that “these missing letters were lost or

destroyed as a group, or, if they have survived (although that seems increas-

ingly unlikely), they survive together” (102). From the perspective of literary

criticism, Najemy has argued that the letters ought to be read as a whole com-

position—not as discrete missives, but a totality—presented in parts. Given this

formal requirement, it seems appropriate that the December 10th letter was likely

lost and/or destroyed as part of a larger group of letters.

3. Najemy is right to insist that the Machiavelli-Vettori correspondence ought to be

read as a collaborative text and an ongoing exchange “between friends” (1994).

It is also true that this particular exchange ends a period of silence between the

two men.

4. Even Davide Panagia, who reads the letter for a Deleuzean theory of political

sensation, accepts the conventional view. “Machiavelli is far from content with

what happened to him,” Panagia writes, “indeed, he is miserable” (2009, 91). No

doubt Machiavelli is suffering in ways he does not report in the letter. He does

speak of the relative meager subsistence offered by his farm. And he is desperate

to find satisfying employment—this much is without question. But his letter is

not especially miserable at all.

he composed his “little work” on principalities.1 The letter is an undisputed

triumph of epistolary form. William J. Connell calls it “modern history’s

best-known private letter” and a “rhetorical masterpiece” comparable to the

great epistles of Plato, Dante, and Petrarch (2011, 93). John Najemy treats

the letter as a crowning example of Renaissance epistolarity and an essen-

tial part of the Machiavellian corpus. Recent historical and exegetical work

has unearthed some crucial details about the famous letter, most impor-

tantly that we can trust in the reliability of the surviving manuscript copy.2

The original letter Machiavelli sent to Vettori has not survived.

Machiavelli’s December 10th letter had marked the resumption of a cor-

respondence between the fallen diplomat and his patron in Rome, after a

puzzling lapse in their communication.3 He begins in speculation about rea-

sons for their silence and expresses gratitude that their dialogue has resumed:

“I can tell you nothing in this letter except what my life is like. If you decide

you would like to swap it for yours, I shall be happy to make the exchange”

(Atkinson 1996, 263). He proceeds to recount a typical day in his life at

Sant’Andrea in Percussina, where, after his release from prison in March, he

spent most of the remainder of a year’s confinement (relegatio) to Florentine

territory. It is Machiavelli’s answer to Vettori’s own prior account of his daily

life in Rome—a study in contrasting fortunes.

Commentators have treated the letter as a testimony of Machiavelli’s mis-

ery in “exile” on the farm, banished from Florence and isolated from friends

and associates (Namazi 2021; Zuckert 2017).4 Read in its entirety and as part